The Night's Dawn Trilogy (21 page)

When the nanonic signalled the pattern had been recorded, he held up the Jovian Bank credit disk and touched his thumb to
the centre. Green figures lit up on the silver side.

Jackson Gael let out a fast triumphant hoot, and slapped Quinn on the back. Quinn had been right: Jerry Baker had come to
Lalonde prepared to buy himself out of fifteen hundred fuseodollars' worth of trouble.

They both stood up.

“Hell, we don't even have to go upriver now,” Jackson said. “We can set up in town. Christ, we can live like kings.”

“Don't be bloody stupid. This is only going to be good until he's reported missing, which will be tomorrow morning.” His toe
nudged the inert form on the wet floor.

“So change it into something; gold, diamonds, bales of cloth.”

Quinn gave the grinning lad a sharp look, wondering if he'd misjudged him after all. “This isn't our town, we don't know who's
safe, who to grease. Whoever changed that much money would know it was bent, they'd give our descriptions to the sheriffs
first chance they got. They probably wouldn't want us upsetting their own operations.”

“So what do we do with it, then?”

“We change some of it. These local francs have a cash issue as well as disks. So we spend heavily, and the locals will love
giving a pair of dumb-arse colonists their toy francs as change instead of real money. Then we buy a few goodies we can take
upriver that will make life a lot easier, like a decent weapon or two. After that…” He brought the disk up to his face. “It
goes into the mud. We don't leave any evidence, OK?”

Jackson pulled a face, but nodded regretfully. “OK, Quinn. I guess I hadn't thought it through.”

Baker moaned again, the wavery sound of a man trapped in a bad dream.

Quinn kicked him absently. “Don't worry about it. Now first help me put Jerry Baker into the drainage gully outside where
he'll wash down into the river. Then we'll find somewhere where we can spend his fuseodollars in style.” He started looking
round for the wooden club to silence Baker and his moaning once and for all.

After visiting a couple of pubs, the place they wound up at was called Donovan's. It was several kilometres away from the
port district, safely distant from any Group Seven members who might be having a last night in the big city. In any case,
it wasn't the sort of place that the staunchly family types of Group Seven sought out.

Like most of Durringham's buildings, it was single storey, with walls of thick black wood. Stone piles raised it a metre above
the ground, and there was a veranda right along the front, with drinkers slouched over the railing, glass tankards of beer
in their hands, watching the newcomers with hazed eyes. The road outside had a thick layer of stone chippings spread over
it. For once Quinn's boots didn't sink in up to his ankles.

Their clothes marked them down as colonists, machine-made synthetic fabric; locals were dressed in loom-woven cloth, shirts
and shorts hand sewn, solid boots that came up to the top of their calves, caked in mud. But nobody shouted a challenge as
they walked up the steps. Quinn felt almost home for the first time since he'd stepped off the space-plane. These were people
he understood, hard workers who pleased themselves any damn way they chose after dark. They heard the xenoc animals even before
they went through the open doors. It was that same eerie whine of the thing which had chased them yesterday evening, only
this time there were five or six of them all doing it at the same time. He exchanged a fast glance with Jackson, then they
were inside.

The bar was a single plank of wood running along one side of the main bar, a metre wide, fifteen metres long. People were
lined up along it, two deep, the six barmaids hard pushed to cope.

Quinn waited until he reached the bar, and held up the Jovian Bank disk. “You take this?”

The girl barely glanced at it. “Yeah.”

“Great, two beers.”

She started pulling them from the cask.

“It's my last night here before I sail upriver. Do you know where I can maybe get a bit of sport? Don't want to waste it.”

“In the back.” She didn't look up.

“Gee, thanks. Have one yourself.”

“A brightlime, thanks.” She put his half-litre tankards down in the puddles on the bar. “Six fuseodollars.”

Which Quinn reckoned was three times what the drinks should cost, unless a brightlime was more expensive than Norfolk Tears.
Yes, the locals knew how to treat transient colonists. He activated the credit disk, shunting the money to her bar account
block.

The vicious black catlike animals were called sayce, the local dog-analogue, with a degree more intelligence than Earth's
canines. Quinn and Jackson saw them as soon as they pushed aside the rug hanging across the doorway and elbowed their way
into Donovan's rear room. It was a baiting arena; three tiers of benches ringing a single pit dug into the floor and lined
with cut stone, five metres in diameter, three deep. Bright spotlights were strung up on the rafters, casting a white glare
on the proceedings. Every centimetre of bench space was taken. Men and women with flushed red faces, cheering and shouting,
soaked in sweat. It was hot in the room, hotter than the spaceport clearing at midday. Big cages were lined up along the back
wall, sayce prowling about inside, highly agitated, some of them butting the bars of that ubiquitous black wood, emitting
their anguished whine.

Quinn felt a grin rising. Now this was more like it!

They found a bench and squirmed on. Quinn asked the man he was next to who was taking the money.

It turned out the bookie was called Baxter, a thin oriental with a nasty scar leading from the corner of his left eye down
below his grubby red T-shirt neck.

“Pay out only in Lalonde francs,” he said gruffly.

A man mountain with a black beard stood at Baxter's side, and gave Quinn a cannibal look.

“Fine by me,” Quinn said amicably. He put a hundred fuseodollars on the favourite.

The fights were impressive, fast, violent, gory, and short. The owners would stand on opposite sides of the pit, holding back
their animals, shouting orders into the flat triangular ears. When the sayce had reached a fever pitch of anger they were
shoved into the pit. Streamlined black bodies clashed in a snarl of six-clawed paws and snapping jaws, muscle bands like steel
pistons bunching and stretching the shiny skin. Losing a leg didn't even slow them down. Quinn saw them tear off legs, jaws,
rip out eyes, rake underbellies. The pit floor became slippery with blood, fluid, and sausage-string entrails. A crushed skull
usually ended it, the losing sayce being repeatedly smashed against the stone wall until bone splintered and the brain was
torn. Their blood was surprisingly red.

Quinn lost money on the first three fights, then picked up a wad of six hundred francs on the fourth, equivalent to a hundred
and fifty fuseodollars. He handed a third of the plastic notes to Jackson, and put another two hundred fuseodollars on the
next fight.

After seven fights he was eight hundred fuseodollarsdown, with two and a half thousand Lalonde francs in his pocket.

“I know her,” Jackson said as the next two sayce were being goaded on the side of the pit by their owners. One of them was
an old bull, his skin a cross web of scars. That was the one Quinn had put his money on. Always trust in proven survivors.

“Who?”

“Girl over there. She's from Group Seven.”

Quinn followed his gaze. The girl was a teenager, very attractive, with longish dark hair falling down over her shoulders.
She was wearing a sleeveless singlet with a scoop neck; it looked new, the fabric was shiny, definitely synthetic. Her face
was burning with astonishment and excitement, the taste of forbidden fruit, sweetest of all. She was sitting between two brothers,
twins, about thirty years old, with sandy blond hair, just beginning to thin. They were dressed in shirts of checked cotton,
crudely cut. Both of them had the kind of thick brown skin that came from working outdoors.

“Are you sure?” With the glare of the lights it was difficult for him to tell.

“I'm sure. I couldn't forget those tits. I think she's called Mary, Mandy, something like that.”

The sayce were shoved into the pit, and the crowd roared. The two powerful vulpine bodies locked together, spinning madly,
teeth and claws slicing through the air.

“I suppose she's entitled to be here,” Quinn said. He was annoyed, he didn't need complications like the girl. “I'm going
to have a word with Baxter. Make sure she doesn't see you, we don't want her to know we were here.”

Jackson gave him a thumbs up and took another gulp from his tankard.

Baxter was standing on the ramp leading from the pit to the cages, head flicking from side to side as he followed the battling
beasts. He acknowledged Quinn with a terse nod.

A spume of blood flew out of the pit, splattering the people on the lowest benches. One of the sayce was screeching. Quinn
thought it was calling, “Help.”

“You done all right tonight,” Baxter said. “Break even, beginner's luck. I let you place bigger bets, you want.”

“No, I need the money. I'm going upriver soon.”

“You build nice home for family, good luck.”

“I need more than luck up there. Suppose I bump into one of those?” He flicked a finger at the pit. The old bull had its jaws
around the younger sayce's throat, it was slamming its head against the side of the pit, oblivious to the deep gouges the
other's claws were raking down its flanks.

“Sayce not like living near river,” Baxter said. “Air too wet. You be all right.”

“A sayce or one of its cousins. I could do with something with a bit of punch, something that'll stop it dead.”

“You bring plenty gear from Earth.”

“Can't bring everything we need, the company doesn't let us. And I want some recreational items as well. I thought maybe I
could pick it all up in town. I thought maybe you might know who I needed to see.”

“You think too much.”

“I also pay a lot.”

Down in the pit a sayce's head virtually exploded as it was slammed against the wall for the last time. Pulpy gobs of brain
sleeted down.

Quinn smiled when he saw the old bull raise its head to its cheering owner and let out a gurgling high-pitched bleat: “Yessss!”

“You owe me another thousand francs,” he told Baxter. “You can keep half of it as a finder's fee.”

Baxter's voice dropped an octave. “Come back here, ten minutes; I show you man who can help.”

“Gotcha.”

The old bull sayce was sniffling round the floor of the pit when Quinn got back to Jackson. A blue tongue started to lick
up the rich gore sloshing about on the stone.

Jackson watched the spectacle glumly. “She's gone. She left with the twins after the fight. Christ, putting out like that,
and she's only been here a day.”

“Yeah? Well, just remember she's going to be trapped on a river cruise with you for a fortnight. You can work your angle then.”

He brightened. “Right.”

“I think I got us what we need. Although God's Brother knows what kind of weapons they sell in this dump. Crossbows, I should
think.”

Jackson turned to face him. “I still think we should stay here. What do you hope to do upriver, take over the settlement?”

“If I have to. Jerry Baker isn't going to be the only one who brought a Jovian Bank disk with him. If we get enough of them,
we can buy ourselves off this shit heap.”

“Christ, you really think so? We can get off? All the way off?”

“Yeah. But it's going to take a big pile of hard cash, that means we've got to separate a lot of colonists from their disks.”
He fixed the lad with the kind of stare Banneth used when she interviewed new recruits. “Are you up to that, Jackson? I've
got to have people who are going to back me the whole way. I ain't got space for anyone who farts out at the first sign of
trouble.”

“I'm with you. All the way. Christ, Quinn, you know that, I proved that last night and tonight.”

There was a note of desperation creeping into the voice. Jackson was insisting on having a part of what Quinn offered. The
ground rules were laid out.

So let the game start, Quinn thought. The greatest game of all, the one God's Brother plays for all eternity. The vengeance
game. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go see what Baxter's got for us.”

Horst Elwes checked the metabolic function read-out on his medical block's display screen, then glanced down at the sleeping
figure of Jay Hilton. The girl was curled up inside a sleeping-bag, her facial features relaxed into serenity. He had cleaned
the nasty graze on her leg, given her an antibiotic, and wrapped the leg in a sheath of epithelium membrane. The tough protective
tissue would help accelerate natural dermal regeneration.

It was a pity the membrane could only be used once. Horst was beginning to wonder if he had stocked enough in his medical
case. According to his didactic medical course, damaged human skin could rot away if it was constantly exposed to high humidity.
And humidity didn't come any higher than around the Juliffe.

He plucked the sensor pad from Jay's neck, and put it back in the medical block's slot.

Ruth Hilton gave him an expectant stare. “Well?”

“I've given her a sedative. She'll sleep for a solid ten hours now. It might be a good idea for you to be at her side when
she wakes up.”

“Of course I'll be here,” she snapped.

Horst nodded. Ruth had shown nothing but concern and sympathy when the sobbing girl had stumbled back into the dormitory,
never letting a hint of weakness show. She had held Jay's hand all the time while Horst disinfected the graze, and the sheriff
asked his questions. Only now did the worry spill out.

“Sorry,” Ruth said.

Horst gave her a reassuring smile, and picked up the medical block. It was larger than a standard processor block, a rectangle
thirty-five centimetres long, twenty-five wide and three thick, with several ancillary sensor units, and a memory loaded with
the symptoms and treatment of every known human illness. And that was as much a worry as the epithelium membrane; Group Seven
was going to be completely dependent on him and the block for their general health for years to come. The responsibility was
already starting to gnaw at his thoughts. His brief spell in the arcol-ogy refuge had shown him how little use theoretical
medicine was in the face of real injuries. He had swiftly picked up enough about first aid to be of some practical use to
the hard-pressed medics, but anything more serious than cuts and fractures could well prove fatal upriver.